Part 3 – The Role of the Press in Election rigging

This is the third part in a series about the rigging of the 2019 December UK general election where we focus on the role of the British press in delivering the extreme right wing governments of Boris Johnson, Dominic Cummings, and the United States.

Note :-I planned put a small personal story here to illustrate the root cause of my anger but my editor said I was “rambling off topic as usual”…So I have put it as a footnote at the end.

The Role of the Media

I have no plans to relive any of the most despicable media output ever to disgrace the name of the 4th Estate. One of the main functions of an active, intelligent and questioning press is to hold those that govern us to account. The British press have not only failed miserably to do that, but they have aided and abetted the very liars, fraudsters and racketeers who have taken over Parliament and stolen the nations cutlery.

Wherever great power and wealth accumulate, corruption, bribery and fraud are never far behind, this was summed up nicely in the famous quotation from Lord Acton in 1887…

Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men, even when they exercise influence and not authority: still more when you superimpose the tendency, or certainty, of corruption by authority.

Considering the circles that John Dalberg-Acton, (the first Baron Acton) moved in during his life, and his almost encyclopedic knowledge of history, there is a very good argument to be made that he knew what he was talking about. It is worth emphasising that the full quote is rarely used in this soundbite age. The bit about “great men being almost always bad men”, seems to perfectly fit the times we live in now.

The Bigger Picture

Simply trotting out a list of fake and false headlines that the British Public have been bombarded with for decades just serves to repeat and amplify them, and I want no part of doing that. Let’s take a step back and look at the events of the last few years from a distance, a Big Picture perspective, for this is where the evidence lays, The Devil is not in the detail at all, it is in the overall plan, the “Long Game”.

I have never had the luxury of being able to play the long game, for over my 60 year working career I have mostly been busy just trying to make the payments at the end of each month. The Long Game is for those with massive wealth and the luxury of unlimited free time, for people with wealth hire other people to work while they can play Golf, the Markets, at being owners of football clubs/F1 teams, or being God and interfering in the democratic process.

The written media has moved to a political position that makes no provision for any form of Socialist involvement in government anywhere in the world. Rupert Murdoch has tightened his grip on both printed and broadcast media, and all major Newspaper titles are now under the ownership of a handful of billionaires. Murdoch has a massive presence in the US, UK and Australia, and it is no coincidence that all three of their governments are led at the moment by people that would be hard put to successfully run a McDonalds franchise. (Not to mention, Liars, Bankrupts, AGW deniers and hate filled Christians). When a nation is run by fools and money there are endless possibilities for exploitation of the people and we are seeing it happen right now.

A Tiny example from the Bigger Picture

In 2019, the UK boasted 151 Billionaires, according to The Sunday Times, but according to Ollie Williams at Forbes it was only 54, and a whole bunch of other Wealth researchers came up with a whole bunch of other numbers too.

The Labour party of the UK actually once quoted The Sunday Times figure of 151 and Forbes and Co and the gutter press couldn’t wait to jump all over the claim, accusing Labour of deliberately inflating the real number. The principle readership of the UK Sunday Times is British, and the business of the UK Labour party is exclusively British, so it seems appropriate to use the Times version, but either way 151 is 0.0002% of the UK population and 54 is 0.0001%.

The difference is irrelevant, but a good media smear campaign on behalf of an unknown number of billionaires at the expense of Her Majesties Opposition party always delights the press.

There is no REAL number of UK Billionaires in any case, any number you choose is just a best guess. Billionaires come in all nationalities, often with passports from a different land to their birthplace, and pass unseen through borders on a daily basis. (So does their money and influence, especially when the media are looking the other way.)

Approaching the 2019 General Election 5 Weeks to go

By the time we approached the 2019 General Election the anti-Labour party noise from the press had built to a crescendo with almost universal hatred of the Labour party and Corbyn especially, coupled with derision at Labours plans and ambitions.

Even the tiny voices of the Left that did exist at the time were drowned out, and the extent of this unanimity is neatly illustrated with these 2 charts from a recent study performed by Loughborough University

The detail on this report is telling, but you won’t be given the chance to read the detail, or in fact any part of this report by any of the regular press.

As the election drew closer the anti-Labour coverage increased immensely and entering the last week of the campaign there was an equally positive contra-surge in support of Boris Johnson and the Tories. Nothing as extreme as this has ever been experienced in UK history, not even during the 2017 election

Overall newspaper evaluations weeks 1 – 5 (unweighted)

As you can see from the data, the attacks became more intense during the 5 week period progressed, and the steady increase in activity implies to me that this was a concerted and coordinated campaign.

You can of course accuse me of Bias, but to make a decent argument you would also need to take a look at this second chart that has been weighted to take account of the circulation figures. To save you the trouble I will happily “cop a plea “of being somewhat Left minded, but to argue that this was NOT an orchestrated and coordinated campaign against the Labour party will take some doing based on the evidence below.

Overall newspaper evaluations weeks 1 – 5 (circulation)

These figures prove beyond argument that the newspapers with the highest circulations (The Sun, Daily Mail and Telegraph) no longer even bothered to pretend they were independent media outlets, and simply became the CPPD or Conservative Party Propaganda Department.

Almost unanimously, the pro Johnson publicity cited pure positivity from every pore, 20,000 more police and 40 hospitals under construction etc. all of which have subsequently been denied only 2 months later.

Amusing to watch now how much of the media now acknowledge that Boris Johnson is a consummate liar, yet they were all instrumental in installing him in office. “Nothing to see here move along please, we all knew Johnson was a liar but we backed him anyway”

It is also interesting to note that although Jeremy Corbyn has stated that he will step down, when a new leader has been selected, he still draws mass hatred and bile from every corner of the Press box. When he goes out on to the streets though, he is warmly greeted by thousands, is it Corbyn and his millions of supporters that are wrong or 5 media Barons and 150 odd Billionaire tax dodgers?

Trying to make sense of it

The British Press, in Theory, get handsomely paid to do a job of work, relaying news to us and giving us accurate information which we can use to form our opinions and our views of the world.

What they do in reality is corrupt the news and withhold or deform information to a very specific agenda, quite simply an Anti-Socialist one run by the Billionaires club. In the case of Great Britain, five billionaires control 80% of the newspaper output. I can only assume that the missing 20 per cent includes some of the lesser known newspapers and The Guardian, which was once held to be the alternative voice of the liberal left. Not anymore it isn’t.

I have never heard of a billionaire being anything but Right Wing, conversely, have you ever heard of a Left Wing billionaire? George Soros is supposed to be a “bit of a lefty”, but when you look at what he does to make his money, and how he spends it, nothing could be further from the truth.

There’s been a lot going on this last three years, and none of it has to do with what we set out to do with The Dangerous Globe. We did not set out to be a political entity, we did not set out to champion any particular cause, and we had no plans whatsoever to get tangled up in in the complete b*ll*x that was Brexit. We started off relaying what we thought were interesting bits of news from all over Europe and putting them into English, for a British Audience.

Then Brexit entered our lives and Jeremy Corbyn, the Evil One, became headline news almost overnight.

We had opened up a Dangerous Globe Twitter account, to help us spread the word, but it soon became apparent that nobody was very much interested in our Science and Society factoids, it was the Brexit Civil War, and you were on one side or you were on the other, and whatever side you were on it was all Jeremy Corbyns fault, and it still is to this day.

The Press played a massive role in delivering Brexit, against the wishes of over 50% of the British people. They waged a campaign of disinformation for nearly 30 years feeding false and misleading information to the public. The EC logged all of this information and the London office of the EU Commissioner produced a Blog entitled Euromyths. The sheer size and breadth of the duplicity involved here is enough on its own to prove a systematic media campaign, but the blog has been withdrawn now that the London office of the EC is shut. The Dangerous Globe is attempting to reopen it. A Twitter existence seems still to be available but the links to the main information behind the Tweets are jammed up in the Wayback Machine. Watch this space

Twitter had a small but thriving socialist community online, but a positively nasty Right Wing influence coming from the other side. Being confronted with the likes of Hopkins, Toadmeister, Gnasher and Robinson for the first time was a bit too much to stomach.

There is a gap in the market for 12 million News hungry people

Jeremy Corbyn was elected TWICE, by a genuine grass roots movement.

600,000 Members of the Labour party, under his leadership, and the Party in the black, financially. (Biggest political party membership in Europe)

A 2017 GE that scored 12.8 MILLION voters for Corbyn-40% of the electorate

A 2019 GE that scored 10.3 MILLION voters for Corbyn- 32.2% of the electorate

Does nobody find it at all curious that with all of these people clearly supporting Jeremy Corbyn and the Labour party, that there was not ONE single main stream news outlet that gave a voice to those people?

Even the Guardians “Liberal Lefties”, like Paul Mason and Owen Jones shut the door on him.

It is not possible that all this took place without stage management. If you could manage to herd 500 Political commentators and journalists in one room, what would they all be talking about?

If an entire Nations Press circus is all singing from the same Hymn sheet they have been attending rehearsals, and there will have been a conductor. There is something fundamentally rotten going on, and John Cleese and I have both spotted it.

We seem to have been sleepwalking for a few years and woken up back in the good old days of Hitler’s fascist Germany. If you think this is an exaggeration, one of the very first things that Hitler did when he took power was appoint a Minister of Propaganda who shut down all criticism of the Fuhrer and his ideas.

It’s now clear that Boris Johnson’s Victorian Government will be built on fear, lies, bullying, unlawful conduct & the suppression of information. If UK media is going to look the other way we must expose it ourselves pic.twitter.com/SaVTDe9CCU

Footnote

This has to do with things that are supposed to do a job properly but in reality do just the opposite, a bit like The Guardian.

About 10 years ago I was working as an HSE consultant to a major oil company on a very large project in the Far East. We had just begun the project and the crew were focused upon training, and I was monitoring the crew managers as they set up the training schedule. As usual early in the morning I checked my emails and saw what the Industry calls a Flash Safety Bulletin connected with an incident in Indonesia. In this case it involved a very unfortunate young man who was attending a training session on fire control and he had been given a fire extinguisher and shown how to use it. A small fire had been created and a class of 30 people were given the opportunity to try putting out. The young man stepped forward, hit the button on the extinguisher and it exploded killing him instantly. Reading the bulletin, I was struck firstly with a moment of great sadness and secondarily yet overwhelmingly a sense of rage. How could it be that the young man lost his life using a piece of equipment specifically designed to save life?

I left my office and went to see the fire officer organizing our crew training session, and found him in a 40 foot sea container looking for fire extinguishers, specifically the old ones that were out of date and could not be used as part of the camps regular fire defences. He emerged from the container carrying two fire extinguishers. While I could understand the financial logic of using the old out of date stock, it occurred to me, in the light of my morning e-mail, that I should take a closer look at the extinguishers in front of me. They were battered and worn and had been shipped from one project or another over a period of some nine years according to their.

The external metal cases showed particular signs of being worn by metal to metal contact while standing up in a steel shipping container in a ship crossing an ocean.

I pondered if this had any bearing on the death of the poor young man in Indonesia, and decided to find out.

Meanwhile all of the ancient garbage that my crew were planning to use was condemned and safely disposed of, and we ordered a new set to use for the training.

How the hell can a piece of safety equipment that is deemed not to be acceptable for regular use be certified as OK to be used for training purposes?